Visualization Critique
Etienne Rolland
Visualization Link
Please provide a link to your visualization critique.
The Dark Web Price Index
Weakness
What do you see as a significant weakness of this visualization? How could you improve it to make it clearer, easier to understand, or more impactful? Make sure you provide some detail in justifying your answer.
Colors palettes
Two differents colors of palettes should have been used for eachs graphs. Instead, here, one palette is just a subdued version of the other. This lead to the misleading assuption that there is a relationship between the categories of the two graphs. For example, there is not relationships between DDOS Attack and FDS - Scan.
Subdued colors should be only used to create accent color scales, as developped here : https://clauswilke.com/dataviz/color-basics.html
I would have use a totally different palette, with orange and other colors not present in the first graph.
Strength
What do you see as a strength of this visualization? Is there a specific choice of the designer that made it especially useful or impactful? Make sure you provide some detail in justifying your answer.
- The type of the graph used : a circular barplot. Even if this type of graphs are visually appealing, they are hard to use properly. Here, this use is plainly justified : there is several grouping variable (Malware, Forged Documents), and the plot make it is easy to compare groups as well as entities into each group.
- They cut the visualization into two graphs based on their price scale, the second graph having only categories with small range of price (1$ to 165$). This split of the data make more things more readable and price more easy to compare.
Also, circular barcharts make sense we you have a huge number of bar to display, which is the case here.